


loved you with a fire red (now it's turning blue)

by thewalrus_said



Series: The Chris Fic [3]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Apologies, M/M, Post-Break Up, Regret, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:21:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29674830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewalrus_said/pseuds/thewalrus_said
Summary: Mathieu Bieri wakes up the day after breaking up with Christophe Giacometti completely certain of two things:1. He is irrevocably, undeniably in love with Christophe Giacometti;2. He can never see or speak to him again.As he groans and rubs his hand over his face, a third thing makes itself known:3. He is the worst person alive.
Relationships: Christophe Giacometti/Christophe Giacometti's Boyfriend
Series: The Chris Fic [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2029171
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	loved you with a fire red (now it's turning blue)

**Author's Note:**

> Note: This is set during chapters 21-24 of tmkhtam, the first fic in this series. I don't recommend reading this without having read that, if you're going to; it will spoil the chapter 25 reveal, and probably won't make much sense besides.
> 
> For those of you who have read tmkhtam, or are pushing on regardless: Enjoy!

Mathieu Bieri wakes up the day after breaking up with Christophe Giacometti completely certain of two things:

  1. He is irrevocably, undeniably in love with Christophe Giacometti;
  2. He can never see or speak to him again.



As he groans and rubs his hand over his face, a third thing makes itself known:

3\. He is the worst person alive.

His intention had been to get out of bed, but instead he has to lie there for several minutes as the full weight of what he did bears down on him. Masochistically he reaches for his phone, pulling up his text chain with Chris from the day before, just so he can garner a crystal-clear, fully accurate picture of what an absolute fuckwit he is. Tears burn in his eyes but he brushes them away, angry at himself; he has no right to cry. He was the one holding the knife, not the one stabbed by it.

Half-formed plans of calling Chris and apologizing, begging for forgiveness, abandoning all his dignity flit through his brain. He pushes them aside. Chris deserves better than a desperate crawl towards absolution.

He deserves better than to have to hear from Mat ever again.

Eventually Mat drags himself to his feet, stumbling blearily in the direction of the shower. He scrubs at his hair under the hot water frantically, as though his shampoo and conditioner can remove the fog of self-loathing he’s cloaked in. He has to put his hands to the wall and gasp for a minute when it doesn’t work, thumping his fist against the tile until his hand aches.

Fuck it all, he has _practice_ today.

He’s been partners with Nadja for a decade, give or take, so naturally she knows instantly that something is wrong. He can see it in the way her eyes settle on him, as heavy as his regret. Their coach notices nothing; all he cares about is keeping them conditioned during the off season. Josef would have noticed; Josef is better about keeping track of his skaters’ emotional states. But thinking of Josef means thinking of Chris, and he can’t do that.

Nadja corners him in the locker room when they’re done. “What happened?” she asks. “You look miserable.”

Mat opens his mouth but he’s not actually able to speak, he finds; all that comes out is a choked grunt. He shakes his head.

“I haven’t seen you in the group chat since Chris was outed,” she says, her voice shifting accusingly. “Did you reach out to him privately?”

Mat bursts into tears. It’s sudden and complete; one moment he’s sitting on the bench, wondering where his voice went, and the next he’s sobbing.

“Oh shit,” Nadja sighs. “What the hell did you do, Mat?”

She doesn’t touch him, doesn’t comfort him, for which he’s pathetically grateful. Eventually he gets himself under control again and manages to rasp out, “You should reach out to him. He’ll need you.”

“What did you _do,_ Mathieu?” He just shakes his head, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. She sighs and crosses her arms. “You have to fix it,” she says, tapping her foot and staring at him. “He’s going through hell; he doesn’t need your shit too.”

Mat shakes his head again. “It’s not the sort of thing you fix, Nadja. It’s over.” A few more tears leak out and he wipes them, jabbing his thumb almost painfully into his eyes.

“Bullshit,” Nadja says.

“I’m serious.” Mat looks up at her. “It’s really bad, Nads.”

She twists her mouth. “Have you apologized?”

He shakes his head. “I can’t.”

“Bullshit,” she says again, angrier. “If you fucked up, maybe you can’t fix it but you need to at least apologize.”

“I _can’t.”_ He drops his elbows onto his knees, running his hands through his hair. “It’s too big.”

“I don’t care,” she says. “Chris is in the shit right now. If you aren’t going to help him, you have to, at the bare minimum, not make it worse.” He doesn’t say anything. She jabs him in the shoulder. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he mumbles. “I’ll... I’ll think about it. Do some research.” Research will help him. Research always helps.

Nadja snorts. “Research into apologies. Now I’ve heard everything.” She pats him on the shoulder. “Get your shit together, Bieri,” she says, not unkindly, and leaves the locker room.

Mat means to start researching right away, he really does, but every time he starts to type the query into Google his hands start shaking and he has to put his phone down or drop it. His regret curdles into a little lump of self-hatred that sits in his heart, growing bigger every day, sending swirls of black despair through his veins instead of blood.

He can’t bring himself to unfollow Chris on Instagram. Chris hasn’t blocked him, for some unknown, unknowable reason, and so Mat can see when he posts an old selfie of him and Viktor Nikiforov, from the last season based on their outfits, and captions it: _Don’t know what I did to deserve this one’s friendship, but it’s mine now, and no one else can have it._

It’s good, Mat tells himself. It’s good that he has Nikiforov. It sounds like Nikiforov has been able to be there for him. It feels like a punch to the stomach, but it’s good.

Nadja grows colder towards him, in a way that must mean Chris filled her in. She’s professional to a fault, and her emotional performance never wavers for a moment as they start to put programs together, but she stops talking to him outside of what’s necessary. It’s good, Mat tells himself again. It’s no more than he deserves.

His pain, so brittle at the start, so ready to shatter and stab him at the slightest wrong move, grows harder, stronger, encasing him from head to toe. At some point he, Nadja, and Accola decide that their theme this season should be _regret,_ and it must have been Mat that suggested it, but he can’t remember doing it.

One day, in mid-July, he opens Instagram to find a post from Chris at the top of his feed. It’s geotagged from Prague, and he’s sharing the frame with a stunningly handsome, oddly familiar man. It takes a few minutes for Mat’s sluggish brain to put the pieces together, but then it clicks: It’s Vahe, the snowboarder Chris spent the 2010 Olympics snuggled up with, when Mat was avoiding him after their first kiss.

He has to sit on the edge of his bed, fingers twisted in the sheets, and just breathe through it. “I have no right to this jealousy,” he says out loud, eyes screwed shut. “I never had an exclusive claim on him, and what claim I had, I threw away. This jealousy is not real or fair.”

It doesn’t work, but he clings to the mantra all that day and the next, and eventually the envy eases enough that he can function again. “It’s probably for the best,” Mat is able to tell himself a week later. If Chris is moving on, that can only be a good thing. He deserves to move on, to find happiness with other people, other lovers. It’s only Mat that should be stuck, still mired in the shit of their breakup.

But a few weeks later, another post goes up on Instagram, a video of a rejected exhibition skate to “Single Ladies.” _If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it,_ indeed. The comments are full of Chris’ fans begging to know who broke his heart; it’s an angry skate, full of bitterness and rage. Rage at Mat; pain that Mat caused.

Mat exits out of Instagram, pulls up Safari, and types _How to properly apologize_ into Google. He has two pages of handwritten notes before he goes to bed that night, all properly sourced and comprehensive. The next morning he starts working on a script.

He calls two days later. It rings to voicemail, as he expected. “I won’t waste your time,” he says as soon as the beep starts his recording. “I’ve been doing a lot of research, ever since I woke up the day after, on how to formulate a proper apology.” Not strictly true, but he’s been _trying_ to do the research. He’s been planning this speech, unconsciously, for months. “Everything I’ve found says it has to have three parts: stating what you did in full, without hiding from it; expressing sincere remorse; and saying what you’re going to do to make it right.” He sighs. “I’ll be honest with you; I don’t know how to make it right. I’ve been wracking my brain for months, trying to figure out how I could possibly make it right, but I haven’t figured it out yet. But I didn’t want to keep you waiting any longer for the first two parts of my apology.”

He takes a deep breath and pulls his sheet of notes toward himself. “First, what I did,” he reads out. “I let you down. I let my fear of scandal and of losing points and of bigotry drive me to hurt you, when I should have been there to support you instead. You were the best thing in my life, and instead of treating you like it, I acted like a coward. I _was_ a coward, and when you needed me to step up, I let you fall, and I blamed you for it.” His stomach is twisting, and his voice is breaking, but he plows on. Chris deserves this, and Mat is going to give it to him. It’s the least he can do.

“Now for the second part.” Tears spring into Mat’s eyes. “God, I— Chris, I don’t even know how to _begin._ I’m so, so sorry, Chris, I’m so sorry, I—” He hasn’t written this part out, and it’s hard to form sentences; the shapeless mass of his regret has him by the throat, and it’s all he can do just to make words come out. He takes a few deep breaths. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he manages to say. “I think it’s the worst thing I’m capable of doing. And I regret it, Chris. I regret it so much, and if I could undo it, I would do anything. I, I _hate_ mys—” _No._ All his research said to avoid self-flagellation; apologize, feel the remorse, but don’t obviously punish yourself or overdo it. That will just make the other party feel guilty.

“I’m sorry,” he says, at a loss for anything more powerful to say. “That’s all I can really say. I’m so, so sorry, Chris. You deserved better from me.” He moves his finger down the page to the third item on the list.

“I still don’t know how I’m going to make it right. But I _will._ You don’t have to forgive me, you don’t have to ever talk to me again, but I _will_ make things right, I promise. I’ll try not to keep you waiting long. I’m sorry,” he says one final time, and hangs up.

Chris has adopted a cat since they last saw each other, Mat knows from Instagram. He wishes he had a cat now, something to cling to and cry into; instead he clutches a pillow to his chest, letting the tears come as they will. His phone buzzes.

_Chris_

_ >> Thank you _

_ >> I’ll be waiting _

_I won’t let you down again << _

Mat gets up and washes his face.

It’s not until he and Nadja are in Canada, clutching gold medals, that he has any progress on figuring out how to make things right with Chris, but when the knowledge comes, it comes all at once, depositing itself wholesale into his brain. “Can we speak tonight?” he murmurs to Nadja between interviews. She deserves to know first; it’ll affect her more than anyone. She nods, looking at him curiously, but doesn’t say anything.

She stays silent all the way back to the hotel, until they’re in Mat’s room, the door shutting out the world. She crosses her arms and leans against the desk. “What’s up?” she says finally. It’s more than she’s said to him socially since she found out what he’d done.

Mat takes in a breath and lets it out. “I think I need to be done, Nads,” he says in a rush, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

Something flickers across her face that looks like understanding mixed with relief, and her shoulders sag. “Is this about Chris?” she asks.

“It’s about Chris, but it’s also about me,” Mat says, dropping onto the bed. “I don’t... I don’t _like_ who I am, Nads. I hate who I’ve become. I want to do something different, something else, something that won’t make me into someone who could do what I did to Chris.” He rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “I want to be _out,_ or at least not in. Hiding’s made a coward of me, and I’m sick of it.”

“Good,” she says, startling him. “Is this an immediate thing, or an end-of-the-season thing?”

“I’ll finish out the season,” Mat says. “I made a commitment to you and I’ll keep it. But after...”

“After, we’ll be done,” she says.

“You’re okay with it?” he asks, surprised. “I’ll do whatever I can to find you another partner—”

Nadja shakes her head, waving a hand to cut him off. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “and I think I want to go back to school. Get my degree, start working. I could put it off for another few years, university will wait for me, but if you’re done now, then I’m done too.”

“Oh.” Mat puts his hands on his knees, a little unsure what to do with them. “That’s good, I guess. For physiotherapy?” She nods. “You’ll be great at it,” he says, more earnest than he intends to be.

“Damn right I will,” she says, grinning, and for a second it feels like the old times, before Mat fucked up, when they were friends. She feels it too, judging by the look on her face and the way she sighs. “I’m proud of you,” she says unexpectedly.

“You are?”

She nods. “I had to take Chris’ side, I had no other choice, but I’m glad to see you start pulling yourself out of it a little. It’s been hard to look at you all summer, you so clearly hated yourself.”

“I still do,” he admits, “but I think, once I’m done, I’ll be able to stop. Once I make things right with him.”

Nadja comes forward and pats his shoulder. “Good,” she says. “I’ll let you be the one to tell Accola once we’re home.” He groans theatrically and she laughs.

From there, it’s all logistics. Accola takes the news surprisingly well, all things considered. Mat’s made his announcement with enough time for Nadja to apply to schools for the next year, and she gets accepted easily. Mat buys her a cupcake to celebrate.

He makes tentative inquiries to the Swiss Skating Federation, which are received warmly enough that he makes them a little less hypothetical. By the new year, he has a job lined up as a commentator for the next season. Accola’s publicist draws up a press release, a basic thing just announcing the news of their upcoming retirement, and he and Nadja sign off on it the day after their free dance and medals ceremony at the Euros.

After that, there’s only one thing left to do.

_Chris_

_You said to come to you when I had my full apology. I have it now. Can I come to you? << _

_ >> 1327 _

_Thank you << _

Mat fidgets in the elevator, smoothing down the front of his shirt again and again and fiddling with his hair. He’d gone with the nicest button-down he’d brought, but he’s stuck in jeans; they hadn’t expected the press release to be done until after the competition, so he hadn’t packed an outfit for this conversation, thinking it would have to wait until they were all back home.

The elevator opens at the thirteenth floor. Mat walks down it, presents himself at 1327, takes a deep breath, and knocks.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/thewalrus_said) or [Tumblr](http://thewalrus-said.tumblr.com)!


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